


Crow's Court

by nwindchaser



Category: Henry V (1989)
Genre: M/M, Stand Alone
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-20
Updated: 2016-10-20
Packaged: 2018-08-23 13:05:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,073
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8329024
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nwindchaser/pseuds/nwindchaser
Summary: When thou art king , let not us that are squires of the night's body be called thieves of the day's beauty;Let us be Diana's foresters, gentlemen of the shade, minions of the moon.Shall there be gallows standing in England when thou art king?Do not thou, when thou art king, hang a thief.





	

They came to the back gate of the house by the usual side alley, out of sight of the main street. When she saw them, the crying child gasped, and hiccupped, and out of surprise ceased to cry. It was too late for her to try to hide.

“Lucy,” said Henry, as he pushed his hood back, and knelt beside her. “Why are you crying out here?”

“Your majesty,” she tried to say, but her nose was all stuffed up and she had to stop to gasp for air. He shed the cloak around his shoulder and brought up his sleeve to her nose. At his beckoning nod, she blew into it noisily. “The money,” she explained. As soon as it was mentioned, tears began to well up and fall in long streaks, hot and heavy. “The money, I’ve lost it.” She showed them both the rope on which the pouch had been strung. It had a knot still tied partway around, but nonetheless was broken. Montjoy bent over and touched the clean cut edges of both ends with his fingers. “No,” he said quietly, “It’s been stolen.”

Henry patted her cheek and smiled cheerfully. “It is my money, is it not? If I care not, why should thee? You tell the matron I said so. Now go on.”

As he straightened up and they watched her pass into the gate, the smile faded away, and he said to Montjoy, “God accursed thieves, stealing from a child. So help me, I’ll hang them.” And the herald gave him a cool look as he answered, “Oh?”

He said, “I’ll help thee.”

He said, “Come on,” tapping Henry’s arm. Henry pulled up his hood and they went back down the alley.

In the back of the bakery, where the ovens were, where the warmth lingered and nurtured the delicious scent of dough rising, of crust browning, of crisp sugar melting, the herald made a gesture at the baker’s wife, with one surreptitious hand. Fingers fluttering, causing her to frown and make a shushing gesture. She pointed them further in. He knew her heart was too good to let them go hungry.

Into where the streets became pitted and pockmarked, gap-toothed, losing their paving stones to patch the poor walls, to keep heat in their fires, then to where they became dust, and stirred mud. Down to where they were no longer comfortably anonymous. Their clothes began to stand out, for they did not have holes. Their sweeping cloaks were not threadbare. Henry began to glance about them, curious for this forgotten corner of his city, but they were self-conscious, and silent, moving swiftly.

Knocking on the window sill, so as not to frighten the old woman sitting on her stool within. It was more a hole than a window, only a rough cover of spindly planks, and she glared out of it with intense suspicion. She held a threaded needle in one gnarled hand, and a small shirt in the other. The threat emanating off the nib of blunt iron was more than most armed guards could conjure. This time he put a coin on the sill before he showed her the sign. She sniffed, and made it disappear, and gave them the right path through the labyrinthine back alleys, drawing with her cracked nail on the side of the wood. Blink, and it would be missed, nor would she pity the blinker, but the herald was watching intently. He bowed, and smiled when she snorted loudly. He knew she kept them from being taken by rain and frost.

It was a faerie road. Walled in cheap wood hauled up from the waves, dashed on the cliffs, hacked from young trees by the inexperienced and paid in chopped arms and legs. They went steadily, progress slowing. Montjoy was not so confident as he had been, one hand on a furrowed brow, trying to remember the crooked finger scratching crooked lines. Not even one wrong turn could be allowed on the faerie road.

Paved in mud, in cleanest muck, here where everything had value, where everything would be saved, the way was pristine, natural. Almost wild, nearly feral. Henry peered through the cracks in the sides, despite a shy, slanted feeling that he shouldn’t. Sometimes he saw into houses, sometimes right through them, to more dusty streets. The young mothers singing a mournful song, mouths moving, hands full and eyes vacantly empty. The young children, full of determination, just yet, full of rowdy life pushing its way into the dirt and through it. He looked around and thought hard about them.

The road continued, in its many endless loops and variations, less a road and more an intercrossing field of slender byways, all nameless, with doors that had no handles, but then they were being hailed by a loud, authoritative voice from a young boy.

He sat nimbly on the top of a fence and called out, “Who goes there?” when they came down the prescribed path. He brandished a small stick, which did not seem too menacing to Henry. Montjoy knew keenly the consequences of one wrong turn on the wrong shaded way. He held up his empty hands, and then, deliberately, put down his hood.

“Ho,” said the boy, showing them a grin with more than one hole. It made him seem mischievous, seem more merry though his eyes were narrowed. “King of names,” he said, “King of letters.”

“Ust. May we see Crow?” Montjoy asked.

“Whos that then?” The stick swerved through the air until it was pointed at Henry’s face. “Haven’t seen him before.”

Montjoy considered Henry for a moment, then shrugged. “My apprentice,” he said, with a slim, lopsided smile. He lowered Henry’s hood, and the gatekeeper cocked his head to either side, like a thrush examining a particularly shiny berry. Then, he kicked the fence, and it cracked open along the seam of a hidden gate.

“Thank you.” They both had to duck to enter, bending nearly in half. Ust tapped him expectantly on the shoulder with one bare heel as Montjoy passed under his small ledge.

“Toll?” he asked.

“Where did you learn that word?” The herald chuckled as Ust made a horrifying face. He pulled out the baker’s package, wrapped up in sackcloth and trailing wisps of grainy flour. The boy made a grab at it, but he held it behind his back, and gave him just one of the sweets. The honey would stick his mouth shut, and then they could pass through the faerie gate without paying toll.

What they entered was a cavern of wood, or a round motte from the time of the Normans. Or an arboreal court, oak grown, tendered, and pagan as they come. There was something of a table near the center, with a squat candle burning a small oily flame. The only thing standing on the dusty ground, haphazardly splintered, hazardous to any user. The sunlight came in sharp shafts, in stripes and only made the gloom more murky, the hanging motes more evident, the atmosphere more stiffly solid.

As they entered, bending under the low roof and still scraping their shoulders, they seemed to pay him some obeisance. The sleek shadow, making a temple pediment with his arms propped up on the table surface and his head down, inspecting something intently. They were ignored, for a studied moment, and then his eyes flicked up and searched them, with the light sensation of being frisked, of relinquishing some close privacy.

“Crow,” said Montjoy, politely. It was impossible from his tone of voice to suspect if he addressed a king, or a beggar, only that it was not his King, nor the English one.

“Herald,” came a terse greeting. There was an unsubtle suggestion that expectations were being formed, and had to be answered to. As his head lifted, his face came into view over the candle flame. Impossibly young, obvious despite the smudged dirt, despite the severely cropped hair. His eyes were direct and made contact from a position of imperious disregard. There was a long feather tucked behind one ear, black and glossy. “Who?” he demanded, with a quick jerk of the chin.

“My apprentice,” Montjoy repeated smoothly. “Henry, Crow. Crow, Henry.”

“Good day,” said Henry, nodding briefly, much like how he had seen Montjoy bow without bowing. It was in the shape of things, the evocative substance. Crow stared at him plainly, for longer than was polite, and then his gaze came slicing back around.

At this point Montjoy offered him the package of sweets, which proved effective at softening his demeanor. He gave a shrill whistle, and deposited it in the hands of the girl who appeared like a gust of powder snow, and disappeared as mysteriously.

“Got a deal for me?”  
“Someone stole a girl’s coin pouch, perhaps an hour ago. Place d’Armes, citadel-side. I would like it.”  
“Not I,” Crow said instantly.  
“So?”  
“So why ask for’t?”  
“The rope was cut. Quite neatly. Any boy older than twelve could have simply snatched it.”  
“Cut is quiet, clever sir. Cut means no screaming.”  
“How one of yours would think,” Montjoy sighed as Crow folded his arms. “No sympathy then?”

“You going for little girls now? That’s disgusting.” His voice pitched up high as he laughed. Thirteen, or fourteen, Henry guessed, and already on the cusp of sharp twenty-five. “You remember what we are? Thieves? Beggars? Sympathy for a servant girl living her whole life in a fancy townhouse? Christ bloody wounds what next, charity? Give me some, seigneur, if ye please.”

Montjoy shrugged, as if to excuse his failed gambit. “Fair trade?”  
“Wait,” the boy commanded, thrusting out his hand. “No trade secrets. Why this one girl? Why her few coins got you down here in less than an hour?”  
“Don’t you know she has lived her whole life in the _King’s_ fancy townhouse?”  
“All right, I’m listening.”  
“Try The Angel. Second floor. Fourth window from the west. Check his shoes.”  
“Do tell us how to _steal_ , horsemonger.”

He pursed his lips and made the same strident whistle. This time it was a boy who slipped in and listened solemnly to his low whispers. The way they conducted their orderly juvenile hierarchy disconcerted Henry, like blinking from one moment to the next only to find the whole world had been subtly changed, and there were changes left to discover. In a few minutes, like sheer magic, a pouch was produced, plump and intact. Montjoy nodded as it was dropped into his waiting palm.

“Wait.” They had barely managed to turn around, bent necks aching. “You. You are English,” accused the boy, pointing a harsh finger. “Yes?” Henry answered in confusion. Suddenly Crow had drawn a knife into his hand, its blade dark with charcoal ash. “Shit, shit, you brought a damned king’s man here?” Another strident whistle brought half a dozen inquisitive faces that hardened into murder at the sight of Crow’s blade. “You want us all hanged?”

“Oh? _King’s man?_ ” _Close, but not quite._ Casually, Montjoy held out his hands, palms outwards. “What say you, Henry?”

Henry stared at all their faces. _I’ld say we’re about to be pecked to death by a hundred little beaks._

“You’re all too little to hang,” he sighed, “Find some honest work.”

The whole flight was silent, watching the lead, waiting on his very next breath. The blade disappeared, sheathed somewhere in the shapeless rags. The children followed, on the edge of his dismissive wave.

“Your apprentice is a chump. A fool. Better find ‘nother.”

Crow stared pointedly at Montjoy as he laughed merrily, as if at some private joke, as if there had not been seven children more than ready to slit his throat. “They say every man is a fool to another,” the herald offered, tinted with a quiet mirth the thief-king did not appreciate in the slightest.

“Right. Get out.”

They got out, groaning as they straightened out and blinking rapidly in the sunlight. Montjoy offered his palm to Ust, who understood without a single word spoken, and with a short, sticky finger drew the herald another map. Another set of streets, depositing them right out on the edge of the district.  

“You think me a fool, Montjoy?” Henry asked, out of the thin, clear air.

Abruptly, the herald stopped short and turned back. He landed a warm kiss on Henry, before he could react.

“No.”


End file.
